


The Holy Substance

by idgit_with_a_fidget



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Aziraphale has a thing about stains, Burns, Holy Water, Libraries, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-02
Updated: 2013-02-02
Packaged: 2017-11-27 23:22:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/667632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/idgit_with_a_fidget/pseuds/idgit_with_a_fidget
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Crowley decides to sneak up on Aziraphale, which is a bad idea, considering Aziraphale uses holy water to tend his plants.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Holy Substance

Aziraphale held the mister at arm’s length and squeezed the white trigger gingerly in order to check it was functioning correctly, squinting his eyes to protect them from the sting of the spray. Once pleased that it was working sufficiently and there were no blockages, he moved closer to a small dusty table in the bookshop corner, cupped his hand around the brick-red pot of a houseplant and spritzed the green leaves with a generous mist. Water droplets dripped from the dainty, thin, cordiform leaves that seemed to glow with a lush, healthy green.

The houseplant was quickly becoming another one of Aziraphale’s pride-and-joy’s (although nothing would replace the book-shaped etchings in his heart). It was small and mild and it only had one miniscule bud; the sepals coloured an off pinkish emerald that had been refusing to flower for a number of weeks, yet Aziraphale was determined to nurture it and gently coax it into bloom in time for the summer and bring some much needed colour into the damp shop. Smiling, Aziraphale gave it another spray, murmuring some sort of sweet nothing about getting a nice big drink, dear. 

The angel was so engrossed in the nursing of his plant that he didn’t hear the familiar tinkling of the bell, strategically dangled by the door, causing it to ring when it was opened. It was less of an alert and more of a warning alarm that let Aziraphale know when a costumer or dealer entered, and gave him time to devise a plan to distract and disinterest them. The sagging bookshop was more of a walk-in bookshelf than a store, and Aziraphale liked to think of it as the modern equivalent to the Library of Alexandria, and that he was responsible for collecting the knowledge that was needed for anything humanity questioned: eclectically ranging from cookery books dating back to the year 4004AD written by cannibals to the most modern version of the English dictionary, with a few bad-taste eroticas hidden in the sleeves of one-of-many Bibles (from one-of-many worlds) for good measure. 

A.J Crowley emerged, coughing, into the bookshop, peering at the ancient covers as though they were written in a language he couldn’t understand (i.e- modern ‘text speak’ or complex adolescent lingo. Despite his fashion sense, Crowley found it difficult to get ‘down with the kids’: their rapidly evolving vocabulary and phrasing excelled him with its speed, faster than a plague of locusts. But then again, he was probably just getting old). He had parked the Bentley on the street outside and had come to pay a debt to his angelic companion: dinner at a fancy restaurant with wine; lots of wine. There just wasn’t the fun in making yourself drunk merely by wishing it, no; you had to feel the gradual swoon of intoxication to make it really count, and that meant doing it the human way. The human way was basically a sport.

He wandered through the shop and daw his friend tending to the stubborn floral specimen, meticulously squirting each leaf- each stoma- with the water mist. Crowley rolled his eyes at such compulsivity. 

Grinning, he crept up behind the angel and clapped him on the shoulder.

“Surpri-argh!” Crowley’s ‘surprise!’ was suddenly turned into a guttural yelp as Aziraphale, startled, had leapt up and sprayed him with the water. Luckily, Crowley had shielded his face with his hand, which was now dripping wet and starting to smoke.

“Crowley!” Aziraphale exclaimed, the word infused with anger, shock and delight. “I’m sorry, dear boy, but you did give me a bit of a fright.”

He shook his shoulders and folded his wings –which had unfurled during the surprise and torn the seams in his shirt- back where they belonged. He made a mental note to groom them later. 

Crowley wasn’t listening but was instead sucking on the drenched hand which consequently singed his mouth. He howled and sucked air sharply through clamped, gritted teeth. He hopped around in a circle, shaking his hand frantically and swearing ferociously both under his breath and out loud, not caring what form of deity his shouts took in vain. His glasses slipped from his nose and clattered to the floor, exposing his yellow eyes. He crushed the right lens beneath his foot.

“What are you _thinking_?” he shrieked.

Aziraphale shrugged and held up his hands in protest. “I was just watering the plant,” he confessed, slightly confused. It was just a bit of water, why was Crowley being so…girly?

“What with? Boiling acid!?” Crowley yelled viciously, groaning heatedly. His tongue and attitude turned the ‘C’ into a dragged out hissing ‘S’ with a devil’s tail and horns.

Aziraphale flinched at the interrobang. 

“No, that would kill it,” he pointed out. “It’s Holy Water. Makes it sparkle,” he added warily.

The colour didn’t so much as drain from Crowley’s face as so much rush to it, pumping a vibrant, violent purple into the pigment. 

“H…Holy…?” he suddenly clenched his jaw, subduing his temper from rising any more and risk bursting an artery. He was still flapping his hand. His tongue –which was forked and could do Really Weird Things- ran over his reptilian lips. He thrust a hand forward. “Just…fix it, angel, now, Zi.”

Aziraphale blushed guiltily. He had understood the situation as soon as he had uttered the H (and W) word. He took Crowley’s hand and turned it over in his own with the air of someone who, externally, is being professional at playing doctor, but, internally, is really panicking and trying not to faint. 

The Holy Water had stripped through the top few layers of Crowley’s skin and caused the flesh to bubble like soup that’s been left on the stove too long. It was sticky and melted, and blood oozed in a thick, slow stream from a wound that kept popping open as soon as it cauterised over again. Crowley’s flesh was, well, literally crawling. The smell was almost as bad as the sight- a foul burning, like a thousand corpses simmering in liquidised pollution in a pot made from animal excrement and burger van grease. Aziraphale swallowed hard as the odour clouded his usually clockwork mind. The demon winced as the torturous bit of the acid shot around his bloodstream like fire- no, like _purity_ \- had been injected straight into his charred heart. He chewed his lip and punctured the bottom one with his scissor-like incisors. 

Aziraphale pursed his lips. “Wait here.”

He turned and scampered through to the back of the shop beyond the shelves. Crowley was left on his own, fidgeting from foot to foot on the carpet. A globule of molten flesh dripped from his palm onto the floor and sizzled there like an egg on Uluru, leaving behind a smelly round stain. Discreetly he rubbed it into the material with his show to hide it from the angel long enough to pretend it was something else when it was discovered later. Aziraphale had a talent for spotting stains. He could get the angel drunk and pretend it was wine. 

“Don’t just leave me here!” he shouted, somewhat desperately. “Can’t you miracle it better, or something?”

“No,” said Aziraphale, who apparent could however teleport himself from the back of the shop to Crowley and ignore the ten-foot stroll. “Right, hold still for me, please, old chap.”

He was holding a cloth in one hand, a bottle of vodka in the other and first aid kit between his knees. He held Crowley’s wrist steady. Crowley wrenched it back, blinking in horror at the vodka. 

“That’s perfectly good alcohol, Aziraphale!” he cried. “You can’t use _that_!”

“Oh, don’t be so petulant, old boy,” Aziraphale replied sternly, adopting the tone of a mother who is urging her daughter to grow up and stop crying about boys after spending several hours trying tirelessly to console her; or a father who urges his son to be part of the football team even though they’d much prefer to be a pirate when they leave university. “You’re making more of a fuss than is needed.”

Crowley whimpered like a mutt watching his master install a machine that buries bones for you as Aziraphale carefully dabbed some of the vodka onto the ruptured skin, making it calm down a little with a minor miracle. Admittedly, he was unsure which type of alcohol you were supposed to use to clean wounds, and even if it made any difference, but he assumed the vodka would suffice for now. 

“You’re wasting it! Look, you’re wasting it!” Crowley squeaked as the alcohol was administered. It trickled through his fingers like sand in a timer. He grit his teeth for it stung.

Aziraphale shoved the cloth between the demon’s teeth in an act of frustration. 

“Do something useful with your mouth and stuff it,” he remarked hotly, then instructed him to bite if he experienced any pain. 

YOU’RE NOT MY DOCTOR, Crowley growled in Aziraphale’s head.

“No, I’m better,” more than six thousand years on this planet, he must’ve picked up some sort of medical knowledge in his time. “Just let me tie this on.”

From the first aid kit (caked in dust and a suspicious green/brown substance), Aziraphale removed gauze and masking tape, both once-white. He unrolled the gauze and cut the tape with his teeth, then placed both over Crowley’s burning hand, using the tape as a fastener. 

“I’ll get some ice,” the angel vanished and appeared again, no fancy pops or showers of glitter. He held and ice-pack which he pressed into Crowley’s hand and forced his fingers into a fist.

He stepped back to admire his crude yet applaudable handiwork. Crowley looked at it, vaguely impressed. It still stung, but it wasn’t as bad. His strange saffron eyes blinked and he felt them moisten. 

“My sunglasses,” he said urgently. “I need them on.”

“A thank you would be wonderfully grateful of you, Crowley,” Aziraphale murmured sardonically.

“Thanksss,” Crowley hissed, forgetting his manners for a moment. He longed for a day where he could speak as he wished and not worry about forgetting himself or remembering etiquette. A day, only a day, where he could be completely free. That day would probably be the Last Day, Crowley reflected fondly. 

Aziraphale stooped and picked the cracked glasses off of the floor. He pulled a face at them as they dangled limply from one leg between forefinger and thumb. 

“They’re a bit bashed but…” he leaned forward and pushed them up onto the bridge of Crowley’s nose, and sorted the hair neatly around his ears; the colour matching that of a specs: a pure cartoon-villain black (that wasn’t even really, really dark brown). Aziraphale realised he couldn’t finish his sentence as spasmodic giggles swelled in his stomach that he couldn’t suppress. 

Crowley glared at him, the slits of his eyes imagining daggers piercing the angel’s brilliant brain via his eardrums. Aziraphale wiped his eyes and laid a friendly hand of Crowley’s shoulder.

“Apologies, chap,” he said without any feeling on genuine sorry. “I shouldn’t laugh. It’s mean of me.”

Crowley growled. “Yes, it is. And coming from me that’s saying something.”

Aziraphale smiled gently. The chuckles fizzled out and turned into a pleasant warmth that blossomed across his chest like the future of his precious house-plant. Crowley couldn’t stay angry at him for long, no matter how many slow afternoons bickering passed. He removed his sunglasses and peered at them. A haunting of sadness crossed his reptilian features.

“You know,” Aziraphale mused aloud, tone soft like feather down on a fledgling. “One wonders why you bother to wear those. I never picture you as the self-conscious type. In all the millennia I have spent with you, you’re not one for modesty, if you don’t mind me admitting.” He was probably referring to the flashy Bentley.

“I wear them to ‘conceal my identity’,” Crowley explained, speaking in a manner that made him sound like a superhero incognito. 

“Yes, I know, but from the humans.”

“Huh?”

“Well…what about me?” Aziraphale asked, and tilted his head to one side. “You don’t have to hide your identity from me. You don’t have to hide anything from me, do you? We’ve known each other long enough-since before you were slithering. We don’t have secrets, do we…?”

 _Sounds like you’re hiding one now,_ Crowley though carefully so that Aziraphale couldn’t hear him.

He considered what the angel said: mulling over his words, his calm tone, how every letter he spoke was perfectly pronounced in a near-whisper; how the pitch was the right balance-not too deep so that it was a raspy, husky, sandpaper scraping, but then similarly not too high so he sounded like a limp-wristed hairdresser. Crowley never really paid attention to the way the angel said his vowels. Time spent amongst the books had made him wise and intelligent, and when he was placid, soothing. For a brief, fleeting moment, almost too fast for Crowley to even register, he felt envy. Almost.

“Crowley.”

Crowley blinked and his haze cleared. He stared at Aziraphale blankly. He waited for his vocabulary to buffer and cleared his throat.

“No, angel. No secrets,” he said, and then wondered whether he meant ‘angel’ as a nickname or just a statement of species, and then wondered whether or not it needed capitalised. 

And it was true; they fought together, they saved worlds together and they drank from the same wine bottle after battles together. They were like brothers, only the type people spread gossip and rumours that they’re closer than that. 

Aziraphale smiled a little solemnly as though he knew, for some reason, their time together would soon be short lived. He dipped his head and edged closer, gaze forlorn. Crowley noticed that there were still fingers around his wrist that slipped closer towards his hand and entangled in his own slender digits, warm and rough from the flip of the page. He looked up to find Aziraphale’s face by his own, lips at his ear. He smelt like Holy water and everything Crowley loved to hate and hated to love.

“Besides, I like your snake eyes,” the angel admitted, and the sunglasses dropped to the floor again. “They remind me that, even though you’ll always be dangerous, that I can still trust you. With my life. With anything you want. With everything I have.”

Crowley felt something dry brush his cheek. He froze and his slit pupils flickered between dilation and dilution. A frisson rattled up his spine. He grabbed Aziraphale’s shirt in his fist as though to keep him close for as long as humanly? No, demonly? Angelically? Possessively possible, he decided. 

Aziraphale didn’t move. “Old boy?”

“Mm.”

“No secrets, remember?”

Crowley nodded stiffly, mouth parched and a tingle of an uncomfortable arousal tickling his abdomen. He had run out of clever things to say. His good hand twisted Aziraphale’s shirt into a tight knot while he bad one remained tangled in the angel’s. He considered making a move, but whether that one would be to turn and flee or tackle the angel and show him that just because he had Fallen, didn’t mean he could ‘rise again’, he was unsure.

Aziraphale grinned slyly. “Capital. Then tell me what has _really_ stained the carpet underneath your shoe.”


End file.
